


Not in the Manual

by ConvenientAlias



Category: Dollhouse
Genre: Bondage, Dubious Consent, Episode: s02e01 Vows, F/M, Light BDSM, Strangulation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-04
Updated: 2016-10-04
Packaged: 2018-08-19 11:28:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8204498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ConvenientAlias/pseuds/ConvenientAlias
Summary: “You made me hate you,” Claire said. She leaned down to murmur in his ear. “I always wanted to crush you like a bug. I wanted to tie you up and whip you, or maybe carve my initials into your chest.” She lowered her head a bit more so that she was talking into the crook of his neck, barely audible. “I wanted to see you bruised and bloody and cringing at my feet. I wanted to make you hurt.”
Or, that fic I wrote because the only thing that Claire/Topher scene in "Vows" was missing was bondage.





	

The first thing Topher noticed when he woke up was a killer headache. Odd—he got hangovers when he drank, but the day before he’d been very much on the job, not drinking. And it didn’t feel like morning. He had a decent internal clock, and he’d gone to bed early that night (do your health a favor, Dr. Saunders had said, and he had for once listened to her because she didn’t talk to him much lately) and it still didn’t feel like morning.

The second thing Topher noticed was the weight on his chest. He looked up, squinting through the dark, and made out the shape of the figure straddling his chest. A woman. Sinuous, leaning forward, wearing nothing but a pair of underwear and a lacy black bra.

Whiskey.

She stared down at him intently, studying his face with bright, obsessive eyes. Cringing away, he closed his own eyes to avoid her gaze. Maybe he could just fall back asleep again and pretend this had never happened, one of his weirder dreams. And he did have some pretty weird dreams sometimes, even though when the dolls appeared in them, they rarely showed up on his chest in their lingerie.

Her hands were on his collarbone, pressing down through the thin T-shirt he wore to bed. “I know you’re awake.”

Her voice had a little hitching vibratio against the deepness that mostly dominated. He had never understood why so many clients were so attracted to Whiskey’s voice. He understood her appearance, her body language, and particularly the personalities he created for her and how well she adapted to them, but the voice had never been sexy to him. It had a touch of pedantry, a demanding, irritated edge. Now, it called him unwillingly back to reality, and he opened his eyes.

And their eyes met.

Dark, curtained pupils and irises. He swallowed. “Whiskey,” he whispered.

Her lips curled. “I knew that was what you always thought of me.”

No. Not Whiskey, of course not—Whiskey was long gone, her face mutilated and her golden days of success and sovereignty in the Dollhouse long broken by Alpha’s innocent vindictiveness. This woman was Claire Saunders. Kind, considerate, dutiful Claire Saunders—to everyone else. But Topher still remembered the strength of will he had put into her, the touch of morbidity and the pain surrounding certain matters in her history. Everyone had their private struggles. He had believed her able to move past them, but lately she’d been falling so hard. He would have liked to catch her, except he was the reason she was falling in the first place.

“Dr. Saunders,” he said fuzzily. Not Whiskey. More than Whiskey, better than Whiskey. She had to know that. “Sorry. What are you…”

He tried to reach up and push her off, or at least sit up rather than remain staring stupidly up at her. It was then that he noticed the third abnormal thing of the night.

His hands were fastened to the headboard by thin, strong wire.

“The hell?” he yelped, though not very loudly. He tugged, slightly. Firm, though not thin enough to cut into his wrists. All right. He had a problem.

“I’m surprised you took the pills,” Claire said quietly. “You really aren’t very much of a genius, are you?”

Pills. Pills. Oh, that was right.

She’d come to him and suggested he go to bed early that night, for the sake of his health. Said he hadn’t been looking well.

“No one’s been very well lately, if you hadn’t noticed,” Topher had said, waving his hands, energized by the fact that she was actually talking to him (and being nice!) for the first time that week. “Have you seen Miss DeWitt? Then there’s Boyd, who honestly seems to be taking to the whole head of security thing pretty well, but I think the stress might be getting to him…”

“Well, it’s pretty obvious that it’s been getting to you,” she had said, interrupting him mid-rant. She’d handed him a small bottle of pills. “Here. Take two of these before you go to sleep. They should help you relax, and they contain some vitamin supplements too.”

“So you’re my doctor too now?” Topher had said, raising an eyebrow. It wasn’t part of her job to treat him. He had a health plan with Rossum and got regular checkups, but none of that had anything to do with Claire.

She’d smiled, and said briefly, “I am what you made me.”

He’d wanted to argue against that, so true and yet so false at the same time, but she’d walked quickly away. So he’d shrugged it off and taken two pills before going to bed early, hopeful that the conversation meant perhaps reconciliation lay in the near future.

Apparently not.

“You’re surprisingly good at tying people up,” he said, testing the wire again. He definitely hadn’t programmed that into her. “Where did you even get this?”

“Why did you take the pills?” she asked him.

“What was in those, anyways? I’m guessing you just wanted to make sure I was asleep so you could do the, you know…” He nodded vaguely towards the wire. “So…just sleeping pills? Considering what you told me, that’s barely even lying. I mean, ulterior motives, sure, but.”

He shut up when she put a hand on his neck and lightly squeezed. But lightly, really. Didn’t even hinder his breathing. Still.

“You never shut up,” she said.

He shrugged. “You’re the doctor. When you prescribe pills, I take them.”

“I’ve been leaving dead animals in your room for the past week,” Claire said incredulously. “Why on Earth would you trust me enough to take something I give you?”

He shrugged again.

She leaned back. “I’m not really a doctor.” And then leaned forward again, in his face, eyes hard. She was the only woman who could be this close, nearly naked, and he was still captivated by her cruel face. “No, I’m not. You’re so proud of your little programming tricks, but just because you gave me the skill set and the memories doesn’t mean any of those things ever happened to me. I’m not a doctor. I’m your doll. Remember?”

He shook his head. “You’re a doctor. You’ve been treating the dolls for years…”

“That I can remember.”

“A lot of that is real,” Topher said. “You did a good job.”

“I did what you made me do,” Claire said. “Because it was what the Dollhouse needed, right?” She smiled. Oh, Whiskey had a smile like the devil but no one was quite as bitter as Claire Saunders. It made Topher half smile back.

She noticed, and she slapped him. Right cheek. Backhand.

Hard.

He gasped. Lightly. Yes, she had a good arm. It had made her valuable as a dominatrix back in the Whiskey days. But she hadn’t hit anyone in a while that he knew of. The good doctor was in a bad mood.

“Don’t laugh at me,” she whispered, furiously. “You think this is a joke?”

“Honestly, I’m not sure what this is,” Topher said. And he really just wanted to go back to sleep.

Her hands gripped at his shoulders again, heels pushing down on his collarbone. “I have some questions,” she said. “You asked if I wanted to know what I was before. I don’t care about that.” Her voice was barely louder than her breath. “I want to know what you made me.”

“I still have the files,” Topher said. “If you’ll just let me get up, we could talk about this more…casually?” He choked back a laugh as her grip on his shoulders tightened. “Or, never mind that. Whatever makes you comfortable, man. Just, maybe put on some clothes?”

“Oh?” Claire tilted her head to the side, eyes wide. “What? Is this distracting you?”

Yes. Yes, it was. Topher nodded slightly, suspecting that was the wrong answer somehow.

Claire smiled, vicious. “Really? But Doctor Brink, you’re usually so good about not being attracted to the actives.” Her hands moved down slowly, down from his collarbone to his chest. “I knew it.”

“What?”

“You made me hate you,” she said. “You made yourself so strongly repugnant to me. I could never like you or desire you in the slightest.” She leaned down further to murmur in his ear. “I always wanted to crush you like a bug. I wanted to tie you up and whip you, or maybe carve my initials into your chest.” She lowered her head a bit more so that she was talking into the crook of his neck, barely audible. “I wanted to see you bruised and bloody and cringing at my feet. I wanted to make you hurt.”

As she finished speaking she pressed her lips against his skin. Topher shifted, just slightly, trying to move his neck away from her. With one hand she grabbed his neck and, holding it in place, bit down hard.

Not hard enough to break skin, draw blood, do any real damage. Enough to hurt, enough to bruise. Topher wondered if Dr. Saunders was clinical enough to calculate the amount of force necessary to intimidate and mark him. Or perhaps if she had simply imagined it enough times for it to be instinctive at this point.

“Do you like it?” she said.

“You said you wanted to ask me about the imprint.”

“You do like it,” Claire said. “You made me want to hurt you because you get off on it, didn’t you? You like women who hate you. You like getting hurt.” She had sat up a little bit more again, but her hand still caressed his neck, gently pressing against muscle and bone, thumb pausing to stroke his Adam’s apple. “If I fucked you while I strangled you to death, would you like that?”

“No.”

“But you do want me to hurt you,” Claire insisted. “You made me want this. You have no right to deny me your pain.”

And her hand wrapped hard around his throat, her other hand coming down to join it. She squeezed and Topher gasped. He tried to pull away from her, tried to buck her off his chest. It didn’t work. Her eyes gleamed.

No. This was not the Claire Saunders he had made. He’d made a good doctor, who cared about the dolls’ health and morality and duty and wouldn’t try to hurt him, wouldn’t…

He stared up into her eyes. Please, he begged silently as he ran out of breath. He wanted the good doctor back. He wanted his Claire.

She let go.

He coughed violently, his body shaking with the force of it. He heard her laugh. She didn’t sound like she was enjoying herself all that much after all.

“Not having fun, Topher?” she asked. “Why not? Isn’t this what you wanted?”

He coughed again.

“You made an ugly little doll,” she continued. She stroked his neck again, and he was too shaken to move away. “You made her scared and suspicious and bitter and angry and confused. Why would you do that?”

“I made you strong,” he whispered hoarsely.

“You made me damaged.”

“Everyone’s damaged,” he said. “I am, DeWitt is, Boyd is—everyone in the Dollhouse is seriously fucked up. And it’s not any different out there either, and you know it.”

“I know what you made me know.”

“I gave you strength,” Topher said. “I gave you pain and moral qualms and the power to make your own choices because that was what we needed. We needed someone to look over the Actives with compassion. With a conscience.” He wheezed again. “We needed someone good.”

“You did a bad job.”

“Yeah,” Topher said. “Maybe I did.”

“Why did you make me hate you?” she asked again. “Was that really so necessary? I work with you every single day and I can’t get it out of my head and you did this to me.”

“I didn’t make you hate me,” Topher said. “I just gave you what you needed and set you loose in the wild. Everything else you did for yourself.” He pulled against the wire again before giving up. “You were doing pretty good.”

“I didn’t choose this for myself,” Claire said, her voice getting a bit higher, a bit louder. “It’s been in my head for years now. You made me want you.”

“I think I know better than to mix a sex doll with a doctor,” Topher said, raising his eyebrows. He winced when her fists clenched on his shoulders. Okay, bad word choice. “If I wanted to program you to like me, I think I’d program you to actually like me. Believe it or not, I’m not a huge fan of the whole…choking…thing. And there are enough people who hate me out there.”

“What do you expect me to believe?” Claire asked. “I came up with all these thoughts on my own?”

“My imprint was only slightly morbid,” Topher said. “Sorry. I…” He shook his head. “Long term imprints can be tricky. Whiskey did have a lot of BDSM imprints back in the day, but they were all thoroughly wiped.”

She snarled. Her hands trembled on his neck. Or he thought they did. Honestly, he was shaking enough himself, that it was hard to tell the difference.

And then she rocked back, even stumbling off his chest altogether, to stand on the floor, her hands now trembling in the air, far away from Topher’s trachea. He wanted to sigh in relief, but couldn’t. Not just yet. She still stared at him, seemingly unable to look away.

He’d failed her. No matter what he’d said about her having created her own personality by now, in some way her pain had to be his fault.

“It’s normal,” he told her earnestly. “Lots of people have the urge to hurt people, even sexually. It’s possible that even your original personality did. I mean we get lots of customers with that inclination. Not that we take the sadists, only the masochists. Which you already know! But. It’s perfectly normal to want to hurt people. And you didn’t, actually, hurt me, so…” Even if his throat was probably going to bruise. That hardly mattered—he bruised as easily as an overripe peach.

“Shut up,” Claire said.

“Right, right,” Topher said, nodding frantically. “Shutting up.” He waited another minute before adding, “It would probably be pretty easy to find someone who was into that kind of thing, if you really wanted to…”

She glared at him.

He nodded again. “Shutting up.”

Claire shook her head. “You still don’t get it, do you?”

Topher wanted to say that he really didn’t get it—she’d been acting very off her imprint since discovering that she was an active—but he also could still see tension in every line of her body, and he wasn’t sure he was allowed to speak yet. He pressed his lips together.

“I don’t want it with anyone else,” she said. “Just you. You’re the only one who makes me feel this way. Who makes me so…” She shuddered lightly. “Sick.”

Moving closer to the head of the bed again, she reached out to Topher’s wrists. He cringed away as much as possible, but she didn’t even touch his arms or hands, instead simply untwisting and tangling the wire holding first his left wrist, then his right. Then she stepped back again.

Gingerly, Topher sat up and placed his hands in his lap, not yet comfortable enough to rub his wrists (though they were seriously raw), to show vulnerability in front of this woman who had already broken through his defenses. He looked up and met her eyes. They were still dark, but she looked away within seconds.

“We’ll talk about the imprint you gave me tomorrow,” she said. She walked towards the door, paused when she reached it.

“If you want, I could take the part of you that wants…this,” Topher said, gesturing to the headboard and the air in general. “And get it out of you. It could be tricky since it wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place but…”

“I don’t need your help,” Claire spat out. “I’m not broken. You’re the only one who makes me so…” She paused. “I’m with Boyd now. I’m fine with him.”

With that, she strode purposefully out of the room, closing the door behind her with a click.

Topher let out his breath in a huff and leaned back against the headboard, adrenalin still racing through his system. Just him, huh? He wasn’t sure he could take it as a compliment.

And now she said she was with Boyd, after all that, as if it made everything better? He snorted. He’d made Dr. Saunders stubborn, all right. There was something that fit about her and Boyd, though. The two of them…they could be good for each other, maybe.

Boyd, of course, probably wouldn’t have approved of her breaking into Topher’s room in the middle of the night and half threatening to deal deadly injury. He was the head of security, after all, here to protect employees from intruders, crazy dolls and each other. Topher wasn’t sure which category Claire fell in, but definitely she didn’t get a pass.

He rubbed his neck gently. It was sorer than his wrists, and he was sure there would be marks in the morning. He would put concealer over them (working at the Dollhouse had, incidentally, taught him how to do makeup)and perhaps no one would notice. For some reason he didn’t want anyone to know about this, know that for a couple minutes he had been so vulnerable, and that Claire had been so far gone. Probably the same reason he hadn’t screamed for help, even though he could have had security there to help him in minutes.

Not because he’d liked it, he insisted to himself. Claire was deluded. He hadn’t put anything like that in the imprint. No, there was definitely no desire to ravish and maul the innocent Topher in the Dr. Saunders manual. And if he’d occasionally enjoyed being submissive in the past, he drew the line at actual physical danger. And while he wanted to trust Claire, wanted to trust the woman he’d helped to form, the woman he’d worked with for the past year, he had seen the look on her face. She hadn’t been sure herself whether she would keep strangling him or not. Not until the last moment.

Still. He didn’t want her to get in trouble. She wouldn’t do it again—at least, he didn’t think so. And if there was something wrong with Claire, he couldn’t help but agree with her that he was partially responsible. There had to be some way he could work it out.

But he could deal with that tomorrow.

He tried to relax back into bed, although his mind was already racing, trying to figure out exactly how to explain Claire’s imprint to her the next day, a unique challenge—he’d never had to explain someone’s own function to them before—in such a manner that she would see her own beauty without believing he determined everything about her. He’d given her self esteem slightly lower than average. Sometimes he regretted that, although at the time it had seemed necessary.

By the time he fell asleep, he’d almost forgotten she’d assaulted him in the first place, although his throbbing throat and wrists would stay a reminder for the next week.

**Author's Note:**

> Soooo...  
> Yeah. I've never actually written anything kinky before, though I do enjoy reading light kink. So I'd really appreciate some feedback on this piece. Where could I improve it? Were Topher and Claire more or less in character? Did anyone else watch that scene in "Vows" and really just want more bondage and strangulation, or am I alone in that wish?  
> So yeah, comments and kudos would be much appreciated. Thanks!


End file.
